Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Our storage engine, affectionately known as Retriever, has served us faithfully since the earliest days of Honeycomb. It’s a tool that writes data to disk and reads it back in a way that’s optimized for the time series-based queries our UI and API makes. Its architecture has remained mostly stable through some major shifts in the surrounding system it supports, notably including our 2021 implementation of a new data model for environments and services.

In software development, dynamic instrumentation is a powerful linchpin between the development and debugging workflows. With software complexity reaching unprecedented levels, it is also a key enabler in boosting developer productivity in the pursuit of building performant and error-free software. Let’s explore the concept of dynamic instrumentation and understand how it boosts software development processes with unparalleled insights into the source code.

Observability tools are crucial to the success of most IT infrastructures and services. This software allows users to quickly track key metrics across all services and applications. By peering into key network metrics, these tools give users detailed real-time data about a system.

I come from the database world where observability, or monitoring as we used to call it, was always really important to keep databases up and running and operating well. Thousands of data points would be collected and displayed in countless graphs. As an expert DBA, you can see every detail about internal database operations and feel very good about yourself being able to put all this data together and resolve the puzzle.

In the current cloud-native era, almost every organization has one or more Kubernetes clusters in their production infrastructures. However, only a small percentage of companies, especially enterprise-level ones, can claim that they are fully committed to running everything exclusively on Kubernetes. The most typical scenario is that new stateless services are deployed on Kubernetes, while legacy applications, third-party services, and databases continue to run on dedicated VMs or bare-metal nodes.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. So far in this blog series, we’ve looked at where enterprises and MSPs are in their observability journeys and the benefits and challenges of their observability deployments. This week, we look at whether the observability story so far is more about replacing or enhancing existing IT management tools.